Enslaved Persons in the Lenoir Family Papers

Twelve Lives, One Ledger: The Norfolk Purchase

June 1810 • Reel 28-2 • Images r28-2-1178, r28-2-1179

In June 1810, Walter Lenoir and W.B. Lenoir returned from Norfolk, Virginia having purchased twelve enslaved people for a total of $2,174.66—recorded in William Lenoir's personal memorandum book with the cold precision of a merchant's ledger. The twelve are listed by name and price: Easter ($245), Bridget ($230), Molly and 4-year-old Jack ($300 combined), Dinah and 9-month-old Rose ($275), Rachel ($155), Jim also called Parker ($190), Black Jim ($166.66), Nelson ($150), Caesar ($250), Betty ($212.50).

But within that same ledger entry, the account turns darker. Dinah and Molly ran away approximately forty miles from Norfolk before being recaptured. Molly had been purchased alongside 4-year-old Jack—possibly her son. By July 1810, Jack was dead, recorded in a brief follow-up note on the next page. A life of four years, purchased for $300 alongside his mother, ended within weeks of the transaction.

These twelve people had lives, families, and histories before they appear in Lenoir's notebook. The record gives us names and prices. It gives us Dinah and Molly's act of resistance—running forty miles toward freedom. It gives us Jack's brief life and Rose's infancy. What it does not give us is who they were before this moment, or what became of them on the Lenoir plantation in Wilkes County, North Carolina.

A Hundred-Dollar Note: Nancy and Her Children

April 1812 • Reel 29 • Image r29-0202

In April 1812, William Lenoir recorded the sale of an enslaved woman named Nancy and her four children by Capt. Cole. Nancy was approximately twenty-seven years old. Her children were Jack (eleven or twelve), Fereby (about six), Liddy (about four), and Letty—just six months old. The entire family was sold for a $100 promissory note.

One hundred dollars. In the same period, Lenoir paid $800 to $1,000 for a single man, Michael Dickens, age twenty-two. The price of Nancy's entire family—five people—suggests either extreme financial distress on the seller's part or a distress sale where keeping the family together was offered as a concession. We cannot know which from the record alone.

What we can note is that this document preserves their names, their ages, and their existence together as a family at the moment of sale. Jack, Fereby, Liddy, and Letty are not abstractions. For descendants searching these records, the single image r29-0202 may be the earliest documentary evidence of a family's existence in this collection.

A Family Written Down: Three Generations in One Archive

ca. 1779–1865 • Reel 18 • Images r18-0773, r18-0776, r18-0835

The most genealogically significant material in the Lenoir Papers for enslaved persons research is a series of birth registers on Reel 18. Spanning roughly 1779 to 1865, these records document births at Fort Defiance with a specificity rare in antebellum records: names, birth months, sometimes exact dates, family relationships, and acquisition notes spanning at least three generations.

Jonathan's group (r18-0773) records an initial community brought to the plantation from 1805 to 1812: Jonathan (1779), Lucy (1793), Matthew, Jim, Betty, Sam, Big Nancy, Anthony, Little Nancy, Letty, and Peter. Nancy's family (r18-0776) records seven children across a decade: Moses (1805), Lucy (1807), Vine (1809), Dinah (1811), Violet (1813), Sally (1815), Lewis (1817). Three women—Nancy, Jane, and Ester—are named in an 1831 Estate Fork memorandum as skilled cloth producers, documented alongside their work output.

Nearly thirty years later, the 1861 enslaved persons list (r18-0835) records W.W. Lenoir's community with birth dates and, uniquely, a marriage: “Uriah and Delia married 16 May 1863.” Maria's seven children are listed by name. These three linked generations—documented in accounting records, estate memoranda, and property lists made for different purposes—form a genealogical record of extraordinary depth. For descendants of the Fort Defiance enslaved community, these images are where the search begins.

The First Name: Jude, 1773

1773 • Reel 34 • Image r34-0425

The earliest enslaved person documented in this collection is a woman named Jude, purchased from Henry Collier in 1773 for £18. She appears in historian Jerry Cashion's 1966 calendar of the Lenoir Papers—a scholar's summary of documents that may or may not survive in full—as a single transaction among hundreds.

Jude's age in 1773 is not recorded. Whether she appears in later records under a different name, whether her descendants are among the people listed in the birth registers on Reel 18, we cannot say from the documentary record alone. What the record tells us is that she was at Fort Defiance before William Lenoir began his detailed memorandum books, before the Revolutionary War ended, before the United States existed as a nation.

The date matters. 1773 to 1865—the span of enslaved persons documentation in the Lenoir Papers—is ninety-two years. The £18 purchase of Jude sits at one end of that span; the marriage of Uriah and Delia on 16 May 1863 sits near the other. Between them: births, sales, deaths, labor, resistance, survival, and silence.

“Names of Negroes Sold”: A Ledger of Losses

1831–1836 • Reel 29 • Image r29-0552

Among William Lenoir's personal memorandum books is a page he titled “Names of Negroes Sold”—his own record of the people he sold over a five-year period. The list spans 1831 to 1836 and documents eighteen individuals sold for a total of $6,575.

The largest transaction came first. On 18 March 1831, twelve people were sold to Robt. Gracy in a single transaction: Jacob (about 50), Zilphy (about 20), Lenor (about 18), Virgil (about 16), Reddin (about 14), Margret (about 12), Washington (about 10), Jerry (about 6)—and four young children. Zilphy was sold with her son John (3½) and daughter Clarissa (1½). Lenor was sold with her son Calvin (2½) and her infant son Elijah, just four months old. Two mothers, four children under four years old, in a single line of ledger.

The later entries are smaller but no less stark. In February 1835, Peter (about 15) was sold to John Moore of South Carolina for $575. Lenoir noted an unusual detail: “gave $10 of it to Peter.” In May 1835, Silby, Fonzo, Avy, and Leah were sold to Robert Carson and Isaac Jarrett for $2,650—$1,500 of it paid in Mexican dollars. In July 1836, Miles was sold to the same Carson and Jarrett for $1,000.

At the bottom of the page, Lenoir totaled the record: “18 Negroes for $6575.” For him, it was an accounting. For researchers and descendants, it is something else: eighteen people removed from the Fort Defiance community, their subsequent histories unknown.

A Witness Writes It Down: The Wellborn Account

1822–1823 • Reel 24 • Images r24-0066, r24-0067

In a notebook spanning 1822 to 1823, William Lenoir recorded an account given by a man named David Dyer describing James Wellborn's sexual abuse of an enslaved woman whose name is recorded as “Dyner.” The document is notable for its existence: a written contemporaneous account, preserved in a personal memorandum book, documenting sexual violence against an enslaved person by a prominent man.

James Wellborn was a figure Lenoir had previously labeled “Black Sheep” in political correspondence—a rival in Wilkes County politics who appears repeatedly in the Lenoir Papers in contexts of legal conflict. Whether Lenoir recorded Dyer's account as evidence for use against Wellborn, as a personal memorandum, or for some other purpose, the document does not say.

What it preserves—however imperfectly across the distance of two centuries—is testimony that someone witnessed what happened and wrote it down. “Dyner” does not appear elsewhere in the collection under this name. We do not know her age, her family, or what became of her. The document exists as testimony, however fragile, that she existed and that what was done to her was noted.

Ran Away: Billy, 1826

November 1826 • Reel 29 • Image r29-0520

On November 9, 1826, William Lenoir recorded in his memorandum book that Governor Israel Pickens of Alabama had stopped at Fort Defiance on his way through Wilkes County. Pickens had served as governor of Alabama from 1820 to 1825 and remained a figure of standing in the region even after his term. His driver was a man named Billy—described as a mulatto, about twenty years old.

While Governor Pickens was at Fort Defiance, Billy ran. He was caught not far away, in possession of Lenoir's saddle and bridle—suggesting he had taken a horse to speed his escape. He was recaptured, whipped, and returned. The memorandum records these facts in the same matter-of-fact tone as a corn sale or a fence repair.

What the record contains is worth holding. Billy was trusted enough—or skilled enough—to serve as personal driver for a former governor, a position of visibility and relative access. He saw an opportunity—a stop at an unfamiliar plantation, a moment of reduced supervision—and took it. The recapture, the whipping, and the return are recorded as administrative facts. Whether Billy ran again, what became of him, and what the world looked like from his position are not in this document. The line is all we have, and it is a great deal.

“Jones Had the Mother and Bought the Son”: The 1839 Estate Sale

1839 • Reel 34 • Images r34-0471, r34-0472

When William Lenoir died in May 1839, his estate was settled and his effects sold. Among the correspondence preserved in the Cashion Calendar—historian Jerry Cashion's 1966 summary of the full collection—is a note about the sale of enslaved persons from the estate. The entry reads that Jones “had the mother and bought the son.”

The sentence is grammatically straightforward and humanly devastating. A mother and son who had been together were separated: she had been given to or acquired by Jones previously; at the estate sale, Jones purchased her son as a separate transaction. The record preserves the separation as a fact of transaction. Neither the mother nor the son is named in the summary entry.

They appear nowhere else in the documented record under these terms. They are a relationship—mother, son—reduced to a business note in an estate settlement letter. The Cashion Calendar summary points to original correspondence at r34-0471 and r34-0472; those images may contain names and further details for researchers willing to look.